Nicolas Party,
Still Life
(2017). Courtesy of the artist, Hasuer & Wirth, Galerie Gregor Staiger, Zürich and The Modern Institute/Toby Webster Ltd., Glasgow. Photo Isabelle Arthuis
English text
By Éric Troncyoften found in his paintings. Guests
were chosen by the two directors of
the gallery who, accompanied by the
artist himself, served the food.
Party is often labelled a “post-in-
ternet artist,” which is strange for
someone who uses the rather late-
18th-century technique of pastel.
Perhaps what people mean is the
novelty of his work, at a time when
inventing the new is not necessarily a
young artist’s first preoccupation.
“We’re so used to seeing comput-
er-generated images now that it has
a big impact on how we see all im-
ages,” he muses. “Technical inven-
tions always have an impact on the
way we make art. And sometimes it’s
something simple, like the invention
of the paint tube, which made it pos-
sible to go outside to paint. These
days we have the computer, the inter-
net and the high-resolution Retina
display. We have access to billions of
bits of information that we can look at
on a very beautiful screen. But it
seems our creativity is lagging behind
the computers we make. Our eyes
haven’t changed their resolution yet.
We have the same hands with five
fingers that artists used 30,000 years
ago to paint animals. The computers
we’re making are extremely powerful
and their evolution in the last 20 years
is truly amazing. But within those last
20 years, humans haven’t changed
much. In the world of technology we
can use the word ‘progress’ ... But
I don’t think you can use it in the cul-
tural world.” Party spent a decade or
so working with 3D animation, and
there was probably something of that
in the large painted-head sculptures
he showed in his 2017 Speakers at
Modern Art Oxford, inspired by seven
of the town’s female characters and
shown with a piano, violin and cello
soundtrack. As for the smaller works
he showed in Heads at M. Woods,
Beijing (2018): “In my head I’m paint-
ing a male because I’m male. And
when I think about gender, and what
a woman or a man is, I’m only asking
from the point of view of a man. Also,
the history of portraiture has mainly
involved male artists depicting young
women. In 2016, it’s impossible for
me to just paint pretty women. It
wouldn’t make sense. There’s a lot of
pretty girls in the street, and you can
say, ‘I paint beautiful things so why
not beautiful girls? I mean, that’s a
good subject, right?’ And, actually, of
course, it’s not, because it’s not ask-
ing the right questions about what is
beautiful and what is a beautiful per-
son or a beautiful face.”His show this summer at
Glasgow’s Modern Institute was ti-
tled Polychrome, which indeed it was,
with its bright-yellow walls and archi-
tectural pedestals in red and violet
carrying body fragments: a green
foot, a violet bust, a blue finger,
alongside pastel-on-canvas works
showing strange characters that
seemed to marvel at being sur-
rounded by butterflies. Party divided
the space into several rooms linked
together by little arched doorways,
designing his show as an experience
that surpassed the academic exer-
cise of showing objects for sale. It’s
putting it mildly to say that you enter
a “world” which the artist devised
himself and which he likes to make
complex, drowning the viewer in a
flood of visual information that forbids
a simple interpretation (in other words
he takes us seriously). While he
quotes Gauguin (“I only want to make
simple art”), he also says he wants to
design his exhibitions as a patient
work of layering that defies rapid con-
sumption, a unique and unexpected
universe whose influences range from
Egyptian sarcophagi to Félix Vallotton,
René Magritte and Giorgio Morandi.
It was in Glasgow, again at the
Modern Institute, that Party put on
one of his first solo shows, about ten
years ago. Born in Switzerland, he
studied film and graphic design at the
École cantonale d’art de Lausanne
(ÉCAL) before studying visual art at
the Glasgow School of Art. Artists’
inaugural shows often take place
close to where they live or come from,
and Party exhibited first at Lausanne’s
La Placette and then in Glasgow,
where his show Dinner for 24
Elephants was initially unveiled in the
form of a 24-person dinner, on 2
September 2011. “When you’re a
young artist, you keep hearing about
the idea of networking: making con-
nections in order to be successful.
And you keep hearing about art din-
ners, where a lot of this networking
happens. Making decisions around a
dinner is an old ritual – from the Bible
to the G7. Sharing food while making
decisions is an important tradition.
Dinner for 24 Elephants was basically
a set for an artists’ dinner. Instead of
going to the dinner after the opening,
the show itself was the dinner,” as he
explained to art critic Rita Vitorelli.
Party designed the plates, the tables
and 24 stools in the form of little ele-
phants; he also concocted the menu
of seven dishes, among which were
a single little oyster, a sausage, a fish
and a poached pear – motifs that areNicolas Party, who’s not yet even
40, reminds us that the artworks
which mark us are never those we
imagined. On the contrary, those that
leave a trace do nothing to reassure
our aesthetic convictions, but instead
lead us a little bit further forward in
the history of form. Party’s show at
Glasgow’s Modern Institute this sum-
mer proved this once again, ahead of
upcoming exhibitions at Brussels’s
Xavier Hufkens in November and
L.A.’s Hauser & Wirth next February.
An unexpected record at auction this
spring was perhaps the crowning mo-
ment in the rapid ascent of an artist
who makes no concessions to main-
stream taste, risking everything for
freedom and his “deviant” intuitions.Screaming colours, unabashed
gradations, unbridled ornamental-
ism, over-the-top decorativeness, the
figurative pushed to the heights of
naivety with kittens, fruit and teapots,
faces like Fayum mummy portraits
that have been violently solarized –
yes indeed, Nicolas Party does not
do what it supposedly takes to gain
the interest of a discipline that is now
far more interested in conformity than
incongruity. Landscape (2015), esti-
mated by Phillips at $100,000 to
$150,000, went for $608,000, six
times the lowest estimate, a record in
terms of wrong forecasting, even
though there had been precedents:
in 2018, Sunset (2018), was estimated
at $60,000 but went for $330,000.Viewpoint
NICOLAS PARTY
ONEIRIC FLAMBOYANCE
Long a devotee of 3D animation,
the Swiss artist has made himself
a reputation as a sculptor and
painter with his highly coloured and
deceptively naive figurative works.